Simon Parkinhttp://www.newstatesman.com/writers/110821
enhttp://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/03/cultural-importance-video-game-arcade
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Once upon a time the arcade was the only place in which the video game could be encountered. Now that games are more often found in our homes and pockets, the National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham hopes to give games a physical venue again.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2015/03/467627554.jpg?itok=DOT0NqWG" width="510" height="348" alt="Children from St Joseph&#039;s School, Nottingham, try out “Mission Control” – one of the games at the new National Videogame Arcade. Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images" title="Children from St Joseph&#039;s School, Nottingham, try out “Mission Control” – one of the games at the new National Videogame Arcade. Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Children from St Joseph's School, Nottingham, try out “Mission Control” – one of the games at the new National Videogame Arcade. Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
Britain’s video game arcades, having been at last evicted from our cities, are now mostly found chirruping on piers in lonesome seaside towns. It’s been a lingering decline. Once upon a time the arcade was the only place in which the video game could be encountered (aside from, perhaps, a date with a squatter on one of the room-sized mainframe computers found on affluent university campuses in the 1970s). But today the video game is ubiquitous, both in homes and in pockets (where a smartphone filled with Angry Birds, Crossy Road and all the Adjective-y others provides a miniature, on-board arcade for the contemporary human). We don’t, in other words, get out so much these days, when it comes to video games. Ergo, the arcade has become a defunct entertainment venue, like Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, the hanging gallows, or the increasingly forsaken cinema.</p>
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It’s difficult to quantify the loss. On the one hand these dens of smoke and truancy were never places associated with virtue. Martin Amis, in his 1982 book <em>Invasion of the Space Invaders</em>, wrote: “There is much cheerless in watching the way sub-teens busy themselves in the arcades. The impatience, the knowingness, the ever-ready anger and frustration...” (At the time, of course, Amis was himself a prominent arcade-goer.) But there was also delight and spectacle to be found atop the beery carpet. The arcade was the video game medium’s live music venue; players performed to crowds, showboating their talent for virtual fighting, dancing or driving, often drawing gasps of envy from captivated watchers.</p>
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This performative aspect to games has now moved to the stadium arena, where young, semi-professional cyber-athletes compete in video games on stages loaned from real world sport (for example, last year’s <em>League of Legends</em> final was held at the Sangam Stadium in Seoul, the cavernous location in which the 2002 FIFA World Cup final took place). But the local pitch has, in the arcade’s decline, almost entirely disappeared. We now have to face the wilds of Twitch or YouTube if we want to see similar acts of virtual genius.</p>
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<img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/images/467627576.jpg" style="width: 510px; height: 340px;" /></p>
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<em>Children create their own jumps at the NVA. Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images</em></p>
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The launch of the National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham on Saturday, a five-storey centre for all things video game (and one that, notably, hopes to bring £2.5m to the local economy during the next five years) will not fill that particular vacancy. This grand and noble project, the brainchild of the organisers of the Nottingham GameCity festival, the closest the game industry has to an Edinburgh, has different kinds of ambitions.</p>
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“We want to inspire people with the sheer breadth of what games can be,” says Jonathan Smith, the NVA’s co-director, and co-creator of the apocalyptically popular series of Lego games based on diamond-grade film licenses such as <em>Star Wars</em>, <em>Lord of the Rings</em>, <em>Indiana Jones</em> and others. “We are at the point at which most people have a particularly game that they like and maybe even love. But we want to remind everyone that there is a wealth of unexplored country out there; if you feel you have permission to explore, you will find exciting and interesting things.”</p>
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The NVA is filled with such interesting things, games culled from the past four decades (all arranged in a higgledy mess – “we like the juxtaposition of old and new”, says Smith. “And children are interested in new game experiences, regardless of when and where they originated”), as well as hands-on exhibits commissioned by and for the centre. One, Mission Control, fills an entire room (situated just after you’ve bruised your hands hammering the buttons an original Track &amp; Field arcade cabinet). Two players duke it out on a vast screen while up to ten bystanders change the nature and rules of the game by flicking switches. It’s possible to scan in drawings to see the images appear in the game as an enemy, even while it's being played live. The game is designed to illustrate to visitors some of the ways in which video games are made, and how designers tweak their rules and assets to find the fun.</p>
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“Jump!”, the NVA’s debut exhibition, continues the theme. It’s a curious deep dive into one of the most common interactions found in video games (players are able to compare classic “jumps” from across the decades, everyone from Super Mario to Halo’s protagonist Master Chief – née John – gets to strut their stuff) and even design their own virtual jump, by setting the angle, mass, gravity and power of an on-screen environment, then launching a digital character into space (their trajectory triggered, of course, by jumping onto a floor mat controller).</p>
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<em>Mission Control. Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images</em></p>
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Indeed, the NVA’s founders hope that the centre will convert a curiosity in game play into a curiosity in game creation. The co-founders hope, furthermore, to demystify the act of game making. “Games are not bolts of lightening handed down by the gods, or things that roll off a faceless factory in America or Japan,” says Smith. “They are made by people, who are constantly leaning and trying to do the best they can. We want to demonstrate that everyone can participate in that process in some way. Everyone can make games.” That process will be further encouraged by programming workshops, game jam evenings (when people are invited to make small games, usually to a set theme – the first will be “jumping”) and a programme for schools to partake in.</p>
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This is the NVA’s practical ambition. In loftier terms, it hopes to shift the video game medium farther into cultural territory. Video games are undeniably a colossal feature on the contemporary landscape – and not just in those oft-repeated financial terms. They are played and, thanks to the rapid democratisation of game development and distribution, made by an increasingly diverse congregation, and explore increasingly diverse themes. But they are rarely considered in cultural terms so much as technological ones. Of course, video games encompass both the arts and the sciences, but they are predominantly viewed through the latter lens, not least because the medium’s evolution has been so closely tied with technological ascent.</p>
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So too, of course, has literature, film and photography (all of which are possible only thanks to supporting technologies). But in video games the technology has a more drastic and obvious effect on the art both in affecting style and scope. For this reason video game coverage is usually kettled into the “science and technology” sections of publications, rarely arts and culture. The NVA hopes to change this. “The industry will welcome this arcade because it sends a great positive message to parents, teachers, guardians, media and governments about the fact that games are more than entertainment,” says Ian Livingstone, CBE, who has been involved in the NVA’s development. “Games have cultural significance. We can celebrate that here.”</p>
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Perhaps, then, video games do need some premises after all. The eradication of the old arcades has removed the idea of video games from our landscape, a largely unnoticeable erasure because games are made of virtual stuff anyway. But there is value in physical representation (as the Protestants quickly discovered after they grimly tore down church buildings post-Reformation: out-of-sight often equals out-of-mind). An institution like the NVA, so prominently situated in the centre of a major British city, gives the video game a place on the landscape again, one that’s cleaner, more respectable and more approachable than the arcades of old, but no less gratifying to visit.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 27 Mar 2015 17:25:34 +0000Simon Parkin226381 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/07/why-indie-gaming-s-obsession-moneymaking-hurts-us-all
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The dominant story of this video game-making generation is the one about the struggling artist who made a breakout hit and never needed to work again, and that’s limiting the kind of games that are getting made.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/07/6020666456_fd1a1e5fa0_b.jpg?itok=LqoIgjcH" width="510" height="348" alt="Planetoids in Minecraft, by Mike Prosser. Image via Flickr/Creative Commons" title="Planetoids in Minecraft, by Mike Prosser. Image via Flickr/Creative Commons" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Planetoids in Minecraft, by Mike Prosser. Image via Flickr/Creative Commons</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
For decades video games have had something of an image problem. It’s not merely their relentless focus on guns, warfare, scrapping and gore, although undoubtedly all that pixel-wrath is something of a turn off. No: games are inherently playful and, in Western society at least, play is seen as frivolous and childish. If play is where living beings learn about the world in a safe context (from lion cubs learning to hunt by play-biting one another to children learning about how to build a shelter from Lego bricks) then it follows that there comes a time when we should grow out of all that pretend stuff. In the realm of sports, at least, people progress from football and rugby’s mud-splattered trenches at some point to golf, a game as much about socialising as it is showboating one’s ability to launch a tiny ball into a tiny hole.</p>
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Perhaps for this reason the video game industry has chosen to peacock its financial earnings in public in an effort to prove its maturity. These are the endlessly parroted figures about how video games are worth more than Hollywood, or how <em>Call of Duty</em> is the “highest grossing entertainment release of all time”. It’s as if, through sales figures, profits and other assorted fiscal headlines video games will be able to buy their way to legitimacy. How fitting that a medium which typically encourages its players to exert dominance over the competition would frame its worth as a battle, usually with cinema, as if this were a fight to be won, as if the winner would somehow usurp the loser, as if each venue for human expression didn’t have unique capacity for joy, wonder and meaning.</p>
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The video game industry was quick to industrialise. Where literature, music and cinema had chance to explore their artistic potential away from monetary preoccupations, video games were born into the arcade where, Cinderella-like they had to earn their keep on the bar floor, minute by minute, credit by credit. Atari, one of the earliest video game companies, would playtest its games in select American bars for a fortnight. If the game failed to earn enough money, it would be figuratively thrown out onto the street. In this way video games and money were yoked from an early age. Thereafter, the cultural conversation has always been secondary to the industrial question: how do we monetise this?</p>
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The rise of the independent video game through the mid-2000s offered a new way to frame the conversation. Here were games being created by passionate creators outside of the studio system, individuals driven by passion, for whom wealth was only necessary to the extent that it fed, clothed and housed them in order to further explore their art. But in a capitalist society, the dominant stories inevitably become the ones that follow a rags-to-riches arc. 2012’s Sundance Film Festival award-winning documentary <em>Indie Game: The Movie</em> formalised the narrative, presenting the stories of three indie developer who, through their passion projects, found fame and unimaginable financial success. “I’m glad the film inspired people, but I don’t like the feeling that I’ve perpetuated a myth that people can get rich making games,” Edmund McMillen, one of the developers featured in the film <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/04/the-guilt-of-the-video-game-millionaires.html">said recently</a>.</p>
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Two years on and indie game development has, from some angles at least, come to resemble the mainstream games industry in tone and ambition. Many have entered the field hoping to replicate Markus “Notch” Persson’s un-replicable success with <em>Minecraft</em>, a game that has made him impossibly wealthy. The dominant story of this video game-making generation is the one about the struggling artist who made a breakout hit and never needed to work again. As a result, the industry’s conferences obsess over how to make effective moneymaking games or, at very least how to make a sustainable business.</p>
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But this is only one kind of success story. Video games, like photography, music, cinema and literature, have tremendous value aside from any consideration of financial gain. If the incentive that we present to young people for making games is predominantly a financial one, then we are all the poorer. Video games allow people to express themselves and present the ways in which they experience and interact with the world and its systems in a unique way to others. Games are, predominantly, a way for self-expression and enrichment and yet the conversation is primarily focused on the “how” of making a living than the “what” of what might be possible within the medium’s bounds.</p>
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This focus on financial gain rather than artistic gain is, arguably, at risk of turning video games into a cultural backwater. The big business side of the industry is characterised by creative conservatism, sure-fire bets based on bankable precedents. Destiny, the $500m blockbuster collaboration between <em>Call of Duty</em>’s publisher Activision may appear to be novel, but it is, in truth, an amalgam of developer Bungie’s <em>Halo</em> and Activision’s <em>World of Warcraft</em>, two of the most profitable video games yet made. In this way the mainstream and indie game scientists concoct their new recipes: a little bit of popular game A mixed with a little bit of popular game B to create profitable, endlessly similar hybrids.</p>
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Shift the focus from the industrial to the cultural and the need to build games based on profitability or sustainability disappears, freeing up the heart and mind to make games that we judge as successful by other, more interesting questions. Did this game challenge my perception of my world? Did this game change the way I am going to relate to my children? Did this game gift me insight into another human’s perspective? Did this game make me smile or surprised or feel a sense of aesthetic wonder?</p>
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The two are not, of course, mutually exclusive: in all mediums powerful art is sometimes also profitable. But in games, seemingly more than elsewhere, profit is the motivator and the games that are most widely written about, from <em>Flappy Bird</em> to <em>Grand Theft Auto</em> to <em>Minecraft</em>, are the financial juggernauts. But these are not the only success stories. Until we begin to tell more kinds of stories, video games will likely remain image conscious and culturally impoverished.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 14 Jul 2014 07:30:25 +0000Simon Parkin205481 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/if-you-love-games-you-are-not-a-gamer
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The idea of the &quot;gaming community&quot; needs to die.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles_2013/452407881.jpg?itok=UA_ikvac" width="510" height="348" alt="" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">People queuing in Covent Garden, London, for the launch of the Playstation 4 in November 2013. Photo: Getty. </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Five minutes into the VGX, a glitzy American video game awards show held last Saturday, one of the hosts made a joke at the expense of transgender people from the stage. According to numerous bloggers, he assured attendees (and the show’s great many television viewers) that the Nintendo character Wario had not undergone sex reassignment surgery. The writer Samantha Allen – herself an ardent game player – wrote eloquently about the effect the comment had on her at the <a href="http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=11609">Border House blog</a>, a site for video game players who belong to marginalised groups. “When I hear a trans joke in a nationally broadcast television show,” she writes, “I’m no longer the confident woman that I’ve become over the last couple of years; I’m a scared little girl cowering in the corner, reeling from the ridicule”.</p>
<p>The show host's comment is just the latest in what has been a bumper year for ill-advised video game-related ‘comedy’. At the industry’s flagship event E3 in June, a male Microsoft representative told a female colleague during the company’s press conference<em> to </em>“just let it happen,” as he attacked her when demonstrating the fighting game Killer Instinct. “It’ll be over soon,” he said, drawing a salacious comparison between his on-screen domination and a forced sexual encounter. “I don't like this," his colleague said in the reportedly improvised exchange, for which Microsoft later apologised.</p>
<p>These faux pas have not been limited to the US. Microsoft publically severed ties with a prominent YouTube presenter after he appeared on stage during a launch event for the company's Xbox One console last month. KSI, as the 18-year-old is known, is famed for his ‘shock-jock’ approach to presenting. He was banned from the Eurogamer video game conference in 2012 after making inappropriate comments to women on film, and he’s been widely criticised for his <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AjVuD7gHqU">‘rape face’ series of videos</a>. In each incident the humour’s subtext has been clear: video games are the dominion of a particular demographic. Those outside of this group are ripe for ridicule.</p>
<p>Video games are the most profitable medium in the entertainment industry. In the early 1990s Nintendo generated more annual profits than all of the American film studios combined. But despite its size, the medium’s audience is often referred to as a homogenous group. Players and commentators talk of the ‘gaming community’, as if the cross-cultural, socially diverse mass of humans who play video games is somehow uniform in gender, race, age and class. The idiocy of the term is only too clear when applied to other media such as literature (the ‘reading community’?), music (the ‘listening community’?) or film (the ‘observing community’?).</p>
<p>The term is a miserable legacy of the medium’s niche past, where video games were viewed as the sole preserve of white, western <em>indoors-y</em> teenagers. The cliché has proven indelible. ‘Gamers’ (a term that further segregates ‘players’, while adding unwelcome ghost notes that call to mind the gambling industry) are routinely represented in media as <a href="http://vimeo.com/12106117">socially inept boys with poor hygiene and a proclivity for impotent rage</a>, perhaps expressed down a Britney-style head mic while playing online shooters, or typed wrathfully onto an internet forum. Gamers are depicted as the contemporary nerd group, a mildly downtrodden crowd, shunned by the jocks and achievers. Gamers are the losers who spend their days in darkened bedrooms furiously tapping on controllers or keyboards in a solitary pursuit that sits close to masturbation in the mind.</p>
<p>The stereotype is powerful and, while it presents non-gamers with an image of the typical player, also informs gamers. Many gain instruction as to how the world views them and the expectation, as is so often the case, becomes self-fulfilling: they play to type. But the ‘gaming community’ is not a homogenous group. The BBC estimates that 100% of British teenagers play video games in some form or other. Within the next century ‘gamers’ will be a term that encompasses every gay and transgender person, every girl and woman, every politician in the cabinet, everyone with a title in the House of Lords, every teacher, nurse, banker, social worker, dustman and paedophile. Video games and their players will be acknowledged as ubiquitous, and the medium’s commentators will be free to move from advocacy (the endless articles and television programmes that, beneath the angle, exist primarily to plead the case that <em>games matter</em>) to more rounded criticism.</p>
<p>But for now, gamers are dishonestly classed as a standardized tribe. Who gains from maintaining the pervading stereotype? There is an argument to say that the game-makers and publishers benefit: they are more easily able to target their marketing to a large and discrete group (“this is for the players” states Sony’s current advertising campaign for its PlayStation 4, for example). But this isn’t quite true: see Nintendo’s gargantuan efforts during the past five years to reach people outside of the traditional gamer demographic. In truth, it’s gamers who fit within the demographic that benefit the most: here, within the artifice of a ‘community’ they find a place to belong, a place where they fit, are understood and are free to be themselves and, together with like-minded people, enjoy a sense of collective power.</p>
<p>There is nothing deplorable about this; the urge to form groups with like-minded people is a universal one. But when that collective power is turned against those on the margins of the group, or those who present valid criticisms of its unifying subject (such as the American-Canadian feminist Anita Sarkeesian, who has been subject to everything from verbal abuse to threats of violence following her <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropes_vs._Women_in_Video_Games">Tropes vs. Women series</a>) it becomes problematic. Sarkeesian, for example,was e-mailed images of herself being raped by video game characters.</p>
<p>There are many reasons that video games are a potent draw to the human mind, but perhaps none more so than the fact that they are endlessly fair and just. They reward you for your efforts with empirical, unflinching fairness. Work hard in a game and you level up. Take the path that's opened to you and persevere with it and you can save the world. Every player is given an equal chance to succeed. As such, there is a prelapsarian quality to video games that makes them irresistible, especially to people whose experiences in life have been of injustice and arch unfairness.</p>
<p>If you are a member of a downtrodden marginalised group, what better salve could there be than a video game, the great contemporary leveller? Games do not distinguish between privilege and under-privilege, between rich and poor, between gay and straight, between loved and abused: in their dimension, everybody is given an equal opportunity. The sense of betrayal then, when the ‘community’ around games does not reflect these qualities can be devastating, especially for a person who has grown to love the medium for those very things that its dominant group of participants fail to embody.</p>
<p>The remedy is, as always, education. Education establishes empathy, and video games are better poised than almost any other medium to participate in this work. They allow us to inhabit the shoes of ‘others’, to view the world through their eyes and to experience the challenges that they endure. <a href="http://www.mattiebrice.com/?p=78">Mattie Brice’s Mainichi</a> offers an arresting glimpse into life as a mixed race transgender woman and the daily challenges faced. Games that explore this subject matter can help us understand the lives and challenges of other human beings. If executed well by the creator and absorbed properly by the player, these works can even have a transformative effect both for the individual and, in turn, the ‘community’ of players that exists around games. The solution, then, might yet be found within.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 09 Dec 2013 13:56:22 +0000Simon Parkin199561 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2013/09/politics-cyberspace-welcome-world-eve
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The virtual worlds of video games hold lessons for the real one. We could learn a lot about how to organise our politics by studying the best video games grounded in democracy, writes Simon Parkin.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles_2013/201336cyber2.jpg?itok=pXawfWj7" width="510" height="348" alt="Eve player." title="Eve player." /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The elect: an Eve player and her alter ego. Photograph: Bara Kristindottir/The New York Times/redux/Eyevine.</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>The arrival of the internet brought with it unprecedented means of human connection, and the most extraordinary of all of these can be found within the worlds of online games. Here, in simulated landscapes, people meet to quest, hunt or simply be together. Known as “massively multiplayer online games”, these virtual worlds live on after a player shuts down the computer and churn away awaiting his or her return. At the height of its popularity, in 2010, one such title, World of Warcraft, had more than 12 million “inhabitants”, whose monthly subscription fees earned its creators more than $5m a day.</p>
<p>Eve Online is a smaller virtual state, home to roughly half a million people, who log on to barter, fight and collaborate with one another daily. What it lacks in population, it makes up for in complexity and texture. This is a science-fiction video game of unprecedented scale and ambition – a cosmos composed of more than 7,500 interconnected star and wormhole systems – that has grown into a huge and fascinating social experiment since its launch in 2003.</p>
<p>As in life, one’s initial experience of Eve is dictated largely by the circumstances of one’s home. Space is divided three ways. “High security” is, contrary to the term’s associations, the ideal place for space cadets. It is heavily policed, so it is here that fresh recruits will find sanctuary from the pirates who roam “low security”, a more perilous patch of cosmos where newcomers’ spaceships are routinely captured and sold. “Zero space”, the third territory, is the galactic Wild West. Anything goes here, among the buckshot nether stars; players may join forces, build empires and fight rival factions to stake their claim to entire solar systems and the precious resources they contain.</p>
<p>High-security dwellers can keep a low profile as they eke out an honest living as a miner or trader, earning money with which to improve their virtual ship or dwelling. The zero-spacers, by contrast, throw themselves into a world of intrigue, engaging in dynamic, player-led plot lines, conspiracies and intergalactic heists. In one notorious incident a few years ago, members of a mercenary group worked for 12 months to infiltrate a powerful in-game corporation, taking on jobs within its structure and in gratiating themselves with its staff. Then, in one orchestrated attack, the group seized the company’s assets, ambushed its female chief executive, blew up her ship and delivered her frozen corpse to the client who had paid for the assassination. Not only was this an act of astounding co-ordination but it had realworld value, too: the virtual assets seized were worth tens of thousands of dollars.</p>
<p>Few other video games allow for the full unpredictability of human interaction in this way. For this reason, Eve’s population is diverse and enthusiastic. However, for its developer, the Icelandic CCP Games, this presents a problem. How do you build the galaxy in a way that keeps everyone happy – from the day-tripping explorer to the moneygrubbing space pirate? Its solution is the Council of Stellar Management (CSM), a democratically elected body of players whose job it is to represent the interests of the game’s population to its creators.</p>
<p>Each year scores of would-be player-politicians stand for the CSM. Just 14 of them are elected. Every six months CCP flies the successful candidates to its headquarters in Reykjavik for three days of intensive debate.</p>
<p>During that time the council meets CCP’s inhouse economist, Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, and hears about new features planned for the Eve galaxy. If they want, they can contest these proposals in the interests of their electorate. Minutes of each meeting are kept and made public afterwards, so there is full transparency over whether a councillor is making good on campaign promises.</p>
<p>“Council members can have very different ambitions and concerns, depending on which part of space they hail from,” explains Ned Coker, CCP’s senior PR officer. “You may have someone who lives in the galaxy’s outer reaches, who will have a very different viewpoint to those that live in a more centralised area.” Likewise, would-be councillors often campaign on specific issues with the promise that, should they be elected, they will promote the interests of those who voted for them.</p>
<p>The run-up to the annual election reflects the way that political parties work in real life. “Candidates come with their own platforms, create propaganda and do a lot of mustering, both in the game and outside it,” Coker says. This year Dave Whitelaw, an oil-rig worker from Thurso on the far north coast of Scotland who makes an Eve online podcast called Crossing Zebras, attempted to interview every candidate in the final ballot for it.</p>
<p>“Candidates fall into three categories,” he says. “There are those who stand on a single issue. Then others who champion a specific play style such as piracy or industry, or who represent a large group of alliances. Finally, there are those who would act purely as a communication membrane between CCP and the players.” As in politics, lesser-known candidates must put more hours into campaigning than more prominent ones.</p>
<p>In May, after months of canvassing, both inside the game and across social media, the line-up of the eighth CSM was announced. It was the fifth time that Robert Woodhead, a 54-year-old from North Carolina in the United States, had been elected. These days Woodhead campaigns on his track record, although that doesn’t preclude doing grassroots leafleting. Last year he harvested thousands of player names from the game’s web forums and sent emails to all, encouraging them to vote when the polls opened.</p>
<p>“I view the elections as good, clean political fun, even a part of the actual game experience,” he says. “You are being elected to be an advocate, not a legislator.” That advocacy, he feels, is remarkably effective. “I have watched the CSM evolve into a very useful tool for influencing the company,” he says. “More and more people at CCP have come to realise that our feedback and advice is tremendously valuable and that we do help shape the game.”</p>
<p>CCP is a business not a nation and, as such, has the final say when it comes to choosing whether or not to act on the CSM’s lobbying. But the council is a microcosm of the game’s populace, in which members hold significant sway. Ignoring their petitions could damage the business.</p>
<p>In 2011 CCP held an emergency meeting with the CSM following in-game riots, which resulted from the developer deciding to take a more aggressive approach to virtual selling. Disgruntled players believed that the introduction of micro-transactions – which allowed players to purchase virtual clothing, accessories and mementos for real money (including a $70 monocle) – was evidence that the game was moving in an unwelcome direction. “The riots happened because CCP prioritised its vision over the needs of customers,” Woodhead explains. “They lost sight of the fundamental reason for Eve’s success – the depth and complexity of the social relationships that it spawns.”</p>
<p>The emergency summit demonstrated CCP’s commitment to listening to the players and showed that the CSM wields power in representing the views of the game’s population. “Some people think the CSM is a PR stunt,” Coker says. “There will always be conspiracy theorists. They think we fly them over here, get them drunk and tell them what to say. But that incident showed the system works. Players not only felt like the CSM was working hard for them – after all, they all put their real jobs and lives on hold for a week – but also they held us to task.”</p>
<p>Even though the CSM is more of a lobbying group than a governing body, it is not immune to corruption. Councillors are privy to forthcoming changes in the game and some members have used this information to their advantage. In 2009 one councillor, Adam Ridgway, bought items worth thousands of dollars to stockpile ahead of a design change to the game that would vastly increase their value. As these virtual items carry significant worth in the real world, CCP closely monitors the actions both of CSM members and of its own staff. It even has an internal affairs department that follows players to ensure they are not using insider information for personal gain. Ridgway stepped down from his position on the CSM following his indiscretion.</p>
<p>More and more sociologists and economists are studying Eve Online, viewing it as a microcosm of the social forces that drive our reality. Its populace, when set against Britain’s increasingly disaffected electorate, is energised and politically engaged. There is a belief that the CSM can have a meaningful effect on the game’s world and that it is therefore important for players to elect the right candidates to represent their interests.</p>
<p>In this virtual world, players can express dissatisfaction with ineffectual council members more easily. “There have been people on council whose inaction has magnified calls for them to be unseated,” says Coker. “And we have the bounty system as a final recourse.” This allows disgruntled players to place a price on a CSM member’s head. “It’s a very effective way to make your political disaffection known,” he says. If ever there are plans to apply lessons learned from studying Eve to the British political system, perhaps we should start with bounties.</p>
<p><em>Simon Parkin writes on gaming for the Guardian and the New Yorker</em></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 12 Sep 2013 07:55:00 +0000Simon Parkin197595 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/08/desert-island-discs-66-years-young
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Simon Parkin looks back at 66 years of a British institution.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles_2013/83538229.jpg?itok=WoRgHFL9" width="510" height="348" alt="" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A desert island. Photograph: Getty Images</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>There exists, in some warm yet forsaken ocean, an archipelago that is home to seven decades’ worth of celebrities, overachievers and VIPs, one inhabitant per island. Deposited there by the BBC licence fee payer, these international luminaries have each provided a 30-minute public insight into their personal story in exchange for a lifetime of sun and solitude. As <i>Desert Island Discs</i> long-discarded introduction once explained: “In this programme, a well-known person is asked the question: if you were to be cast away alone on a desert island, which eight gramophone records would you choose to have with you – assuming, of course, that you also had a gramophone, and an inexhaustible supple of gramophone needles.”</p>
<p>The gramophone and its limitless needle stash is gone, and, if "<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/is-the-bible-to-be-cast-away-by-desert-island-discs-8755958.html">rumours</a>" are to be believed, the copy of the Bible given to every castaway along with a <i>The Complete Works of Shakespeare</i>, a literary work of their choice and a single luxury item may soon follow. But the programme itself has survived more or less intact since its January 1942 debut. In that time it has established the broadest and most enduring catalogue of spoken interviews in the world – especially since more than 1,500 episodes from its archives were made public over the past two years – drawing together the past century’s brightest, best or most notorious actors, novelists, politicians, journalists, comedians, musicians, artists and commentators. </p>
<p>It is, ostensibly, a music programme and certainly, for the first few decades the interviewee’s musical choices provided the primary topic of conversation. There have been many different approaches to selecting the music, from the fickle (“I ran my fingers down the index very quickly and said: ‘give me 8 of those’” - Spike Milligan, 1978) to the scheming (“I’ve chosen nothing but women’s voices as I have a feeling that’s what I’d miss most” – Clive James, 1980) to the strenuous (“I have just hated it.” – Tim Minchin, 2012). But the shrewdness of the format – and rarely has a format proved so enduring – is that, more often than not, one’s most treasured pieces of music sit close in the heart or mind or gut alongside life’s formative moments and passions.</p>
<p>Music is magic, and in the most literal sense; submit to the spell being cast and it has the power to transform mood and temperature, to conjure not just the emotion of memory, but also its very flavour and experience. It can reorder the mind, raise or lower the blood, produce tears (and a great many of <i>Desert Island Discs</i>’ interviewees have wept at a choice composition, no doubt contrary to their intentions before entering the studio), set teeth on edge or, most impressively, to entirely transport a person to another place. In asking an interviewee to pre-select eight defining pieces, the ground is softened and prepared for the anecdotes that they soundtrack.</p>
<p>Not that the series has always provided the level of memoir-based insight that current audiences yearn for. In his later years, the show’s originator, Roy Plomley, assumed a less formal interviewing stance, but for a long time, in keeping with the broadcasting tone of the day, episodes were stiffly formal and the interviews are often prim and thin, offering little more than a superficial survey of the subject’s career or interests. The contemporary listener can't help but feel frustrated when, for example, Plomley fails to follow up on why Jacqueline du Pré (1977) never saw the "half of her family" who still live in her birthplace of Jersey or, when he neglects to ask why Roald Dahl fell out with Walt Disney (1979). </p>
<p>The series has since been hosted by three subsequent interviewers, the warm but unchallenging Michael Parkinson (1985-88), the feisty and antagonistic Sue Lawley (1988-2006) and the current incumbent of the interviewer’s chair, genially astute Kirsty Young. More recently, interviewers have grown comfortable with digging more forcefully into their subject’s character. Today, almost every interview contains that most innocuous of requests: "Explain to me what was it like growing up", a simple trick that time and again proves its power to unlock a person. Then there’s its suckerpunch sequel about the parents (Were they cloying? Distant? Pushy? Indifferent?) to find out the myriad ways in which the family helped form the subject and/or, to borrow the poet Philip Larkin’s colloquial, <i>fucked them up</i> (Larkin himself escapes this line of questioning – he appeared on the programme in the easy-going 1970s).</p>
<p>The differences in each host’s approach, and the responses they elicit, make for captivating listening to anybody who works as a professional interviewer. Sometimes Parkinson’s soft approach works wonders with otherwise guarded men (Robert Maxwell, 1987; Kingsley Amis, 1986) while other subjects thrive when faced with Sue Lawley’s wounding vernacular (Armando Iannucci, 2006). At other times, the interviewers clash with their subject: it’s a painful moment when Martin Amis parrots the cliché "And that’s <i>where it all began</i>" back at Lawley or when she rudely asks whether Robbie Coltrane put the three stone he lost that year “back on again” or, most recently, when Kirsty Young counters the columnist Julie Burchill’s assumptions with the knock-out line “you don’t know me”. </p>
<p>The power of the series is that it manages to make for compelling radio, regardless of the subject’s willingness to bare themselves (the author Bill Bryson, 1999, is unexpectedly guarded while <i>Daily Mail</i>’s editor Paul Dacre, 2004, is expectedly so). It’s always interesting to compare subjects who appear on the series twice, at different moments in their career. Contrast the somewhat dour and self-doubting 1996 version of Hugh Laurie with 2013’s confident, post-<i>House</i> iteration. And while the emphasis, at least on British subjects, remains on white, Oxbridge graduates, Plomley and his successors have managed to welcome a diverse church, from Nicolai Poliakoff (1963) to V S Naipaul (1980).</p>
<p>Nevertheless, the most enduring episodes are those that bring to light the extraordinary stories of less well-known subjects, such as journalist Robert Fisk (2006), who recounts his experiences interviewing Osama Bin Laden (a scenario that ends with a personal invitation for Fisk to join the Taliban), or former MI6 secretary Margaret Rhodes (2012), who recalls, at the age of fourteen, emptying her shotgun at a low-flying German aeroplane during World War II.</p>
<p><i>Desert Island Discs</i>, as well as providing an extraordinary aural archive of many deceased luminaries, is also a trove of trivia. We learn the music that Arthur C Clark and Stanley Kubrick would listen to while co-writing the movie <em>2001: A Space Odyssey </em>(Vaughan Williams’ <i>Sinfonia Antartica</i>) – minutiae that would likely stay buried were it not for the series’ unique angle. We discover that Salman Rushdie was the author of Lyon’s advertising slogan "Naughty But Nice" (1988, on the un-anticipated eve of the fatwa), that Roald Dahl invented the word "gremlin" (1979) or that David Attenborough first suggested that the BBC televise Wimbledon.</p>
<p>At the end of each episode the interviewee is asked which of the eight records they would save from the waves if forced to, as well as what purely luxury item they might take. These choices are often quietly informative (“My lucky sixpence” - Chris Tarrant, 2001; “potato chips” - Whoopi Goldberg, 2009; “A cyanide pill” - Stephen Fry, 1988; “Nelson’s Column”- David Bailey, 1991) but by then, in most cases, we already have the measure of the human, and their selection merely confirms our hopes or misgivings. </p>
<p><i>BBC Radio 4’s </i>Desert Island Discs<i> is on hiatus for the next five weeks, during which time a series of "best of" editions will broadcast. The archive can be accessed </i><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs"><i>here</i></a><i>.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 15 Aug 2013 11:13:53 +0000Simon Parkin197174 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/voices/2013/03/leaving-home-home
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>When Simon Parkin&#039;s grandfather moved into a nursing home, his grandmother was left alone in her cold house. Who has it worse, he wonders?</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles_2013/house-dark.jpg?itok=OAtPiMnW" width="510" height="348" alt="A cottage. Flickr/markhillary" title="A cottage. Flickr/markhillary" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A cottage. Flickr/markhillary, used under a Creative Commons licence.</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p> </p>
<p>Every summer holiday I’d lay awake on the narrow bed and listen to the only other piece of furniture in the room – the hulking wardrobe, as the beetles dined. This was the nightly ritual at my grandparents’ cottage, where the insects would feast en masse during the dark, tapping their mandibles loud against the wood till they finally stilled, replete at dawn. It was the closest I came not to adolescent rage but to adolescent <em>madness</em>: whipping from my bed, torching the light and poring, murderously over the bedroom furniture for something, anything to obliterate under thumb.</p>
<p>Nowadays the diners are gone, dispossessed by decay perhaps, as the wardrobe’s grain grumbled past its sell-by years ago. The house is all decline, its ceilings fissure-scrawl maps, its walls threaded by varicose veins of damp. It’s been this way since I can remember – close to three decades - but it never really seemed to matter very much before. The house was held together by warmth and love.</p>
<p>The beetles aren’t the only evictees. My grandfather departed shortly before Christmas, siren-wailed into a local hospital’s waiting bed where the staff mended what they could before making the grim pronouncement: he could not return home. His care was too much for my wearied grandmother to provide; he would need to find a new place to live.</p>
<p>The benefit of terminal illness – and it’s a grim benefit, but a benefit nonetheless – is the schedule it brings. Sure, the sentence is elastic: they might give you two months and you cling on for twelve, or two weeks and you’re wilted and gone in a day; but terminal illness and its prognosis sets the pace of one’s decay.</p>
<p>Mere old age - the sort of old age my grandparents are suffering - has none of that. It’s all unwelcome surprise, slo-mo shock horror. Death grows in us like a baby, its presence felt more each year, its strengthening kicks acting as reminders of our inexorable decline. But death’s final birth remains, for many, unannounced. It arrives to crown old age when we’re least expecting.</p>
<p>This is the problem for the elderly couple separated by unsynchronised degeneration. One remains in The Home, healthy but lonely, clinging to the household debris of memories. The other is sent to A Home, cared for but lonely, sitting in some medicinal chair facing a window on to a road that winds back to the old house and its memories.</p>
<p>Who is worse off in the arrangement? The left-behind, with her uneasy freedom and schedules that swivel around the visiting hour appointment, or the intrepid handicapped, deafened with drugs and the aggressive scent of industrial-scale linen-washing? He too awaits the visiting hour, but with a sapless tongue, his time now measured by the rising yellowy-tide in the catheter bag and the unwavering TV schedule.</p>
<p>“I’m not going yet,” my grandmother says, defiantly, all weekend as I stay with her. “There’s too much to do around this place anyway. And I’m certainly staying put till I’ve drunk all of the homemade wine.” We both laugh, long and eagerly – more than the joke deserves, but less than we need to.</p>
<p>Over our weekend together this becomes our battle cry of united defiance whenever a reason for moving out reveals itself. “Not yet!” she says. “Not yet!” I echo.</p>
<p>But she is preparing. She’s been preparing for years now, asking my brother and me to point out the household objects we’d like to inherit when the day comes. She would stick Post-It notes to these items’ bases with the relevant sibling’s initial drawn on in marker pen. I always saw this as a morbid request, and felt greedy and uncomfortable in answering her. But she was just preparing, trying to take care of things; being a good grandmother.</p>
<p>“I’m worried that he’s not eating enough,” she says, later. “Maybe I should move in to ensure he’s getting enough food?”</p>
<p>I point out that she is paying an extortionate amount for her husband to stay in The Home’s care and that it's the staff’s responsibility to ensure he is putting enough away. “Yes,” she says. “Yes you’re right. I’ll get your father to have a word with the staff.”</p>
<p>“That’s the spirit!” I say.</p>
<p>“Not yet!” She smiles, ruefully.</p>
<p>The government has been trying to improve the lot of our ageing population of late, or at least trying to appear to try to improve their lot. For many, the final years of life consume everything that was built up beforehand, at least in financial and material terms. Last month the coalition committed to fund any care that an individual might require over £75,000 (a full £40,000 more than economist Andrew Dilnot recommended in his review). That, of course, doesn’t go towards the cost of care in a new home, only treatment. Regardless, a financial solution can only ever be a partial solution. There are deeper, wider factors for any couple facing a care home, ones that grow yet wider if the couple in question cannot move together – factors to do with guilt, loyalty and the incomprehensible pain of a separation that was not asked for.</p>
<p>I have my own cause for worry too. The house (fissured, varicosed) is also close to freezing. My grandparents were born pre-war and, like many farmers of their generation, live as if rationing was still in angry effect. Heat is doled out from the electric fire in momentary burps, before the ‘off’ switch is thriftily flicked and yet another woollen cardigan slipped into.</p>
<p>“You eat too quickly,” she admonishes, often.</p>
<p>To be this cold inside a home is unsettling for the contemporary human, who reasonably expects walls and rugs to offer adequate shelter from the cruel elements. I take two hot water bottles to bed and watch as steam rises, not just from my breath, but also the ambient heat of my <em>fingers</em>. She’s not ready to move out yet, psychologically but also physically. And yet, this is no place for an elderly lady to decline, drawn smaller by the temperature, diminished by the absence of warmth and love.</p>
<p>Sleep is death’s brother. But in this sort of cold, they’re twins. There’s no longer even the insect’s tap to act as a heartbeat indication of life any more, the questing micro-jaws whose nibbles and scrapes can keep a man warm through mere irritation. All that’s left is the air of cold immobility that precedes decay. And the questions - those unanswerable questions.</p>
<p>My grandmother wakes me first thing with a rap at the door. She’s still wearing the headscarf she slept in, tightly wrapped and tied beneath her chin. She’s eager for me to hit the road, grateful for my company and the various errands I helped her with, but ready for me to be on my way now. The new day has brought with it fresh challenges and to-dos which I am not to be a part of and, moreover, she’s worried she’s keeping me from my own familial responsibilities. This is the curse of the kindly matriarch left behind: managing everybody else. “Come on,” she says. “Time for you to get home.”</p>
<p>We lock eyes and I smile.</p>
<p>“Not yet!” I say. “Not yet.”</p>
<p> </p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 06 Mar 2013 09:57:46 +0000Simon Parkin193274 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/02/nobody-remembers-their-first-kill-importance-video-game-violence
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Violence isn&#039;t unique to cinema or games - they&#039;re just the latest recruit to the aftermath blame tradition.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles_2013/210426424_9393ea424d_b.jpg?itok=XkmKQ2Y9" width="510" height="348" alt="" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Do you remember the first chess piece you "took"? Violence doesn't just occur in digital games. Photograph: Potamos Photography on Flickr via Creative Commons</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Nobody remembers their first kill. It’s not like the high security prison-yards, where they pace just to forget, dream-haunted. When it comes to video games, <em>nobody</em> remembers their first kill. If you can recall your first video game, well, then you’ve a chance of pinpointing the setting (over a blackened <em>Space Invaders</em>’ killing field? Atop a <em>Sonic the Hedgehog</em> green hill? Deep within a <em>Pac-Man</em> labyrinth?). But a name, date and face? Not likely.</p>
<p>It’s not just the troubling number of digital skeletons in the players’ closet that prevents recollection – although from <em>Super Mario </em>to <em>Call of Duty</em>, the trail of dead we game-killers leave behind is of genocidal proportions. It’s that these slayings are inconsequential. Remember the first pawn or knight you "took" in chess – the moment you callously toppled its body from the board? Hardly. Even if the piece had a name and backstory – a wife and children waiting on news back home, a star-crossed romance with an rival pawn – such details would have been forgotten the moment you packed away the board.</p>
<p>Most game murder (and its moments-older twin, game violence) leaves no imprint on the memory because it lacks meaning outside of the game context. Unlike depictions of death in cinema, which can trigger keen memories of the viewer’s own past pains and sorrows, game violence is principally systemic in nature; its purpose is to move the player either towards a state of victory or of defeat, rarely to tears or reflection. Likewise, there is no remorse for the game murder not only because the crime is fictional but also because, unless you’re playing for money or a hand in marriage, there is no consequence beyond the border of the game’s own fleeting reality.</p>
<p>Video games were deadly from the get-go. <em>Spacewar!</em> – the proto-game of the MIT labs played on $120,000 mainframe computers in the early-1960s set the tone: a combative space game in which two players attempted to be the first to gun the other down. From this moment onwards violence was the medium’s defining quiddity. This is no great surprise. Most sports are metaphors for combat. The team games – soccer, rugby and so on - are sprawling battles in which attackers and defenders ebb and flow up and down the field in a clash of will and power led by their military-titled "captains". American Football is a series of frantic First World War-style scrambles for territory measured in 10-yard increments. Tennis is a pistol duel, squinting shots lined up in the glare of a high-noon sun; running races are breakneck chases between predator and prey, triggered by the firing of a gun. That video games would extend the combat metaphor that defines most human play was natural.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/images/mario(1).jpg" style="width: 510px; height: 444px;" /></p>
<p>The arcades concentrated the metaphor into sixty-second clashes between player and computer, dealing as they invariably did in the violence of sudden failure. This was a financial decision more than it was an artistic one: their designers needed to kill off the player after a minute or so in order to squeeze another quarter out of them. Violence was part of the business model: in the battle between human and machine, the machine must always overwhelm the player. In such games, as the author David Mitchell wrote, we play to postpone the inevitable, that moment when our own capacity for meting out playful death is overcome by our opponent’s. This is the DNA of all games, handed down from the playground to the board and, finally to the screen.</p>
<p>The problem of game violence then – the problem that’s inspired a liberal president to call for Congress to fund another clutch of studies into its potential effects on the player – cannot derive from its existence or even its ubiquity. Violence is a necessary function of the video game. The problem must be to do with the aesthetic of the violence – the way in which its rendered on the screen. It is a question of form, not function – something that moves the conversation into the realm of all screen violence, a <em>style </em>concern.</p>
<p>The date at which cinematic violence began to become violent can be accurately set at 1966, the year that the Hay Production Code (which moderated on-screen "brutality and possible gruesomeness") was reversed and film edged closer to becoming a director’s medium. Arthur Penn’s <em>Bonnie and Clyde</em> (1967) and Sam Peckinpah’s <em>The Wild Bunch</em> (1969) took the cartoonish invulnerability of old movie violence (the "ox-stunning fisticuffs", as Vladimir Nabokov put it) and splattered the screen with blood and gore instead. Soon movie directors were ordering blood pouches in the thousands, crimson-washing every fight scene, exploring the boundaries of this newfound visual freedom.</p>
<p>Depictions of video game violence chart a similar trajectory from the staid to the outlandish, but it's a journey whose pace was set by technology, not censorship. Early game designers couldn’t spare the graphical processing power needed to render a tubular spout of blood or a glistening wound. They made do with guttural screams to bring the collapsing pixels to more vivid life.</p>
<p>Devoid of censorship and drawn to the potential marketing potency of being dubbed a "nasty", some developers courted controversy with violent subject matter (notably 1982’s <em>Custer’s Revenge</em>, an Atari 2600 game in which players assume the role of a scrawny settler dodging arrows in a bid to rape a bound American native girl). But even the most vulgar scene is robbed of its power when rendered in tubby pixels, like a lewd scrawl in a tittering teen-age boy’s exercise book.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/images/custer.jpg" style="width: 510px; height: 219px;" /></p>
<p>When the technology caught up and games had the opportunity to begin to present the game violence and murders in a truer to life form, the uncanny valley effect continued to render them inefficient. 1997’s <em>Carmageddon</em>, a game in which players attempt to mow down policemen and the elderly in a car was the first game banned from sale in the UK, but this was due to a back-fired marketing stunt (the developer unnecessarily sent the game to the censors hoping for an 18-rating to increase the game’s notoriety, and found its sale prohibited) rather than sober deliberation or genuine public outcry.</p>
<p>Real violence, the non-violent among us suppose, is unlike Hollywood’s screen violence (pre or post 1966), being less dramatic, less graceful and quicker in character. Few video games, even today with their obsession towards a sort of "realism", attempt to present anything approaching a realistic depiction of violence. It’s all comic book, high-contrast spectacle, designed for maximum feedback, maximum excitement: a multiverse of Michael Bay overstatement. It’s all stylised in the extreme.</p>
<p>That’s not to say that video games don’t have the capacity to depict violence in its grim, real-world horror. Indeed, they are the optimum medium, with their unreal actors and easily fabricated tools and effects of violence. But few game-makers currently appear interested in exploring this space. In part this is because the independent game movement, which drove Hollywood’s interest in truer violence post-1966 is more interested in non-violent games. When violence is the staple of the mainstream the subversive creative space is in creating games devoid of the stuff. One of 2012’s most highly regarded indie titles, Fez, was created to specifically without a single on-screen death. Not even Mario – gaming’s Mickey - with his Goomba-defeating head stomps can claim as much. In a medium soaked with inconsequential violence, the counter-culture exists in the creative space that exists away from the metaphorical battlegrounds with their headshots and KOs.</p>
<p>The concern about game violence recently became America’s concern-du-jour, an addendum (suspect?) to the post-Sandy Hook gun control debate. In December 2012 Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, accused the games industry of being “a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people.” Then, in January 2013, representatives from Electronic Arts and Activision - the publishers behind the <em>Call of Duty </em>and <em>Medal of Honor</em> series - were called into a conference with vice-president Joe Biden to discuss the relationship between games and real-life violence. Subsequently President Obama has called for more studies to investigate what links tie game violence to real violence, while US senator Lamar Alexander provided the extremist perspective in claiming on television that “video games is a bigger problem than guns”.</p>
<p>Overstated depictions of violence are not unique to video games and cinema. Shakespeare’s theatres were awash with blood, and directors routinely using goat’s entrails to add verisimilitude to a gory scene. If the realistic (or exaggerated) depiction of violence in art leads to real world mimicry, then it’s been happening for centuries. As the British comedian Peter Cook drolly put it, when referring to the supposed copycat effect of screen violence: "Michael Moriarty was very good as that Nazi on the television. As soon as I switched off the third episode, I got on the number eighteen bus and got up to Golders Green and... I must've slaughtered about eighteen thousand before I realised, you know, what I was doing. And I thought: it's the fucking television that's driven me to this."</p>
<p><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/images/norussian.jpg" style="width: 510px; height: 383px;" /></p>
<p>Video games are the latest recruit to the aftermath blame tradition. And, like all new mediums, they provide the right sort of looking scapegoat, enjoyed as they are by a generally younger demographic (at least, in the cultural perception), from whose ranks America’s highest profile public-killers appear to step.</p>
<p>There is perhaps only one factor that separates games from other screen media: the interactivity. It’s here that the generational mistrust of the medium is allowed to blossom into full-throated critique. The games are killing simulators, they say. They allow the unstable to act out their murder fantasies – something the cinematic nasty could never do. This argument ignores the truth that violence in all games is primarily functional, always within the context of a broader aim, the conflict between the player and the designer. The interactivity may place the player in the role of a killer, but only in the same way that the chess-player is cast as the ruthless general.</p>
<p>And yet there is truth in the statement too. A disturbed mind <em>could </em>ignore the vital function of violence in a game, and instead fully-focus upon its form. The crucial ingredient is not the game itself, but the disturbed mind with its dreams of sadism, fantasies of mortal power, obsession with trauma, not to mention its brokenness and depravity. Even within this context, and with an inability to discern what is earnest and what is play, a lifetime of violent games is unlikely to affect anything but the <em>style </em>of a subsequent atrocity.</p>
<p>In the aftershock of an act of madness some seek prayer, others revenge – but most seek sense in the senseless moment. In the hours following the Sandy Hook massacre a news outlet erroneously reported that the shooter was Ryan Lanza, the brother of gunman Adam Lanza. Poring over his Facebook profile, many noticed that Ryan had ‘liked’ the video game <em>Mass Effect,</em> a space RPG trilogy created by the brothers Dr Ray Muzyka and Dr Greg Zeschuk. Emboldened by an expert on Fox News drawing an immediate link between the killing and video games an angry mob descended on the developer’s Facebook page declaring them "child killers".</p>
<p>Despite the absurdity of the logic, a chain effect was set in action, one that’s toppled up to the White House. Video games are the youngest creative medium. What literature learned in four millennia, cinema was forced to learn in a century and video games must now master in three decades. The issue of game violence and its potential effects may seem like an abstract, esoteric issue, demanding of scientific study to make clear what is opaque. But game violence has logic and precedence and is always an act of play, not of sincerity. The worry is then with those who cannot tell the difference, from disturbed high school student to the US senator.</p>
<p><em>Simon Parkin is a journalist and author who has written for The Guardian, Edge, Eurogamer - and now the New Statesman. He tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/SimonParkin" target="_blank">@simonparkin</a></em></p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 12 Feb 2013 09:50:58 +0000Simon Parkin192721 at http://www.newstatesman.com